


Arrival

by SkySamuelle



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Lyanna Centric, One Shot, Tower of Joy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-25 02:02:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4942444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkySamuelle/pseuds/SkySamuelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lyanna Stark on her way to the Tower Of Joy, running toward the future and looking back to her burning bridges.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arrival

The Red mountains of Dorne are a beautiful sight, all more welcome after days of riding without a true break. Her horse is tired, eager to stall, but Lyanna never felt more electrified. All of her senses are awake, alive with the awareness she left everything and everyone behind. Just how many times she dreamt of running away somewhere, somehow, since her father shackled her to that damned betrothal with a man she didn’t want? Of seeing something more than her beloved Winterfell? Here is a dream that became reality, against all odds. She feels weightless, brazen, like she might lift the world on her palm.

She meets Rhaegar’s smiling violet eyes, allows hers to rake over his angular features, feels the elation of not having to hide under an hood or the night’s cover – in Dorne, they are as safe as they will be until the dust of her false abduction settles.

There’s a warmth, in thinking that, secret or not, he’s her husband now. _Hers._

She feels herself to just _glow_ as she smiles back to him, her grin wide and unashamed and free as she feels now, in her very bones.

She thinks of her mouth on his in the night, of his hands laying her down in the grass, exploring her body, of the guilty thrill of their secret letters, the disquietude that she tried with all herself to put down and away when she thought him married to someone else.

Once upon a time, when she was about thirteen, she fancied herself in love for almost one year and half with the stableman ‘s son, sharing childhood games and first kisses , first touches and _curiosities_. She remembers her total devastation when her father took him away, having his father assigned to another occupation. She remembers the tears, the sense of hopelessness, drowning, raging, feeling crushed by her very Stark name, and thinking the wound would never heal.

This thing she has now is so different, and yet so very the same.

She remembers, as well, the lukewarm interest she half-forced on herself out of loyalty to her kin, when Ned ‘s words tried and tried to paint Robert as fierce, hot-blooded, adventurous and loyal, and her own true feelings always reasserting themselves on that lovely portrait as a restless impulse to escape the noose prepared for her.

 _Do your duty and love will follow._ –her septa told her and maybe for girls, that was how it had to go.

It didn’t work for her tough, no matter how hard she tried, how badly she desired at times she could dupe herself in believing it could.

She disliked Robert, his being too loud and his eyes that always found her without never truly seeing her, his exaggerated promises that just reminded her that he could take her beauty and imagine she was some other woman underneath.

Having him against her will, under the assumption that a woman chose what her House chose for her, nothing else, just made it worse, inflamed what it could have been a tepid distaste to a nearly visceral disgust.

In contrast, she liked Rhaegar from the very first moment she heard him to sing, not for his cool, ethereal looks but rather for the sadness and the emotion in his eyes and voice, for that shadow of doom that seemed to follow him and set him apart from the rest.

She heard him and it was like if in that first song she had taken some involuntary first measure of him. _This is a man that feels deeply, our prince._ She had thought then and time had proved her right.

However ill-advised it was his first pursuit of her, however the idea of his first marriage troubled her and jarred against her ideas of worth and honor, however strongly she felt against both infidelity and bigamy both… here she was.

All because she let her heart to go to a prince with a dreamer’ soul, an head full of prophecies and his faith in them, and shoulders burdened with a kingdom on fire.

Perhaps in the beginning she had meant it like a chivalrous friendship, an innocent and romantic interlude before she became a Baratheon bride, a last platonic, vibrant romance to remember in a future she could not imagine as anything else but dreadful and grey, but soon it became _more._

And suddenly, to be someone else’s wife when she could be his was unthinkable.

_Love is madness indeed, but we are grateful for it all the same._

If she looks back, she has misgivings.

Elia Martell for one, even if her new husband insists that their union is purely political and that her Dornish upbringing guarantees she won’t care about being the only wife as much as she will about being the _ruling_ queen , when the time for it comes.

Crowns are of no concern to Lyanna, and she will gladly step aside if it means she gets a family at peace.

She has never wanted to humiliate the Princess, even if she can’t say her feelings were ever priority in this matter.

_It shames me, but it is true._

And then there’s the mad king, the plot to depose him , her family and the way she knows she has disappointed them by running away with Rhaegar, by making herself less and less of a proper daughter.

Benjen, who kept her secrets and that she is not likely to ever see again.

_Have I picked my happiness over everyone’s else?_

It is a doubt that returns to her, if she allows it, so she keeps her eyes on the future, on the hope, on the freedom.

She chose this, and the truth is that her husband is more dear to her _because_ he is her choice and her choice alone, not her fate or her duty.

She has seen him in a song, found him in a few clandestine conversations and letters, enjoyed the colors of his spirit she came to glimpse, picked him over her duty, her safety , her remorse.

She has believed him to be her best chance in the world to happiness and because of it , she has chosen to throw in her lot with his lot, regardless of how a wild bet it was.

She is definitely happy now.

And even if she was always taught that happiness like this doesn’t last and you should not take decisions based upon it, she regrets nothing.


End file.
